Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal and Other Stories Read Free Page B

church, in the nineteen-twenties, had begun to try to lure youth back into the grace of the fold; but it was quite another for Ormsby-Hill to be seen waiting for her at the factory door, often at the dinner hour and almost always at night, and then walking home to The Pit with her through the rushing crowds of shoemakers hungrily herding homewards on foot or on bicycles.
    â€˜He comes of such a good family. He went to Oxford. His mother lives in a big house in Wiltshire. And Bertha—fromThe Pit. From
there!
What do you suppose the vicar thinks? And his mother? He doesn’t wear the dog-collar very often, does he? I suppose he’s ashamed.’
    Ormsby-Hill, strangely, was not ashamed. He existed boldly, for an entire autumn, a winter and part of the following spring, in a state of suspended enchantment. And Bertha in turn rewarded him as she had rewarded James William Sherwood and Tom Pemberton: with the sort of affection that moulds itself on the pattern of the receiver. If it is possible to imagine her as being sensuous in well-cut tweeds that was how she looked that autumn, winter and spring. And she looked like that and dressed like that for a sound simple reason: because Ormsby-Hill loved her and because he wanted her to. She also went to church, though her mother was a Methodist and went to chapel, and watched him take part in the services and listened to him preaching and reading the lessons. She took on also some of his accent, slightly Oxford, his phrases and his muscular mannerisms. She was sometimes to be seen in country pubs outside the town, drinking from large tankards of draught ale, laughing with ravishing heartiness and saying such things as:
    â€˜Darling, how could you? You’re too, too awful. You’re really shame-making, honestly you are. Really shy-making. All right, pet, let’s have another. Why not?’
    Suddenly, in the June of that year, there was no longer a Rev. Ormsby-Hill in the town, though down in Cornwall, in a remote rocky village isolated on the coast, a new congregation was getting ready to welcome a new curate in September.
    â€˜One dead. One killed. One disgraced,’ people said. ‘Who’s she going to ruin next?’
    Nobody seemed to understand that, down in The Pit, it was not Bertha’s place to give an answer.
    I, in part, gave it instead.
    She was now, like the century, in her twenties. It was the bright, gay, desperate time. There was much dancing.
    She was always the central figure at dances, seldom wearing the same dress twice, always strikingly golden, elegant, friendly, in demand. Perhaps the friendliness was the nicest thing about her. She never refused the clumsiest lout a quick-step. She waltzed on equal terms with youth, age, undergraduates, shoe-hands, golfers, shooting men, clerks, masters of fox-hounds, always beautifully companionable, at ease, talking whatever language they spoke to her.
    And presently, the following summer, she was even dancing with me.
    It was a very hot sultry evening in early July and some of the men, after the habit of the twenties, were wearing blazers and white flannels. Most of the girls were in light silk or satin frocks and the doors and windows of the dance hall were all wide open and you could see the blue brilliant evening beyond.
    I had just decided to disentangle myself from the hot sea-crab embraces of a
Paul Jones
when suddenly the music stopped and I found myself, by pure accident, facing Bertha, almost isolated on that corner of the floor.
    She smiled and at once raised her bare golden arms towards me. Both the smile and the gesture might have been those between two old friends, though we had in fact never even spoken before.
    She was dressed, that evening, in striking oyster-coloured silk. The dress was short and sleeveless, in the fashion of the day, and she had matching gloves and shoes. Her eyes, naturally very blue, seemed to catch in reflection all thebrilliance of the evening outside,